Apologies for the lateness, but I’ve been quite buy for the past week.

Still… wow. Just wow. I don’t think that I’ve ever watched an OVA that contributed as much to its original series as Higurashi Rei (the only one that comes close is the Rurouni Kenshin OVA). This is really why I like Studio Deen so much: at first sight they seem like your average overly cute production company, but SO many of their stories are just SO DEEP and meaningful. Now that the director has become the director of Shion no Ou, this series can really show its true potential now.

What a bunch of awesomeness this episode was. Rika once again demonstrates that she is a truly unique character and really, the way the events unfold in this episode is just amazing, even though this really was a very quiet episode. Again the themes of friendship are explored: it turns out that Rika was very much acting like a princess before she ended up in this world, and this caused the mysterious distance between her and her other classmates: she used to have so many friends, and when they disappeared she always felt alone.

And it makes SO MUCH damned sense. The original Rika was cursed from the point where her mother died, and there was no way that she would have grown up to be a normal girl if she knew about her identity, not to mention that Oyashiro-Rika would never start acting like a stuck up princess, but now that she had nothing to fear, nor wasn’t involved with the whole Oyashiro-sama, she’d indeed grow up to be a very normal girl, and since she was a member of one of the three great families, she probably was quite spoiled as well.

There are two episodes left, and in these two episodes Rika is going to have to kill her mother. When the episode started, she very nonchalantly said that she’d have to kill her own mother if she had to (and I really could see her commit a murder easily, considering all of the things she has been through, which is just shown by the downright brutal way she attacked Satoko), but later this episode, she finally after centuries learns of the feeling of having a caring mother. I believe that in the earlier arcs when Rika’s mother was still alive, she was too busy with the dam and started losing interest (judging by the way how Rika says that her mother never believed her stories).

I’m really not sure what happened to Toshifumi Kawase. He directed some really crappy series in the past, like Beyblade, Dragon Drive and Tenjou Tenge… but then at one point he suddently became incredibly good, churning out Shion no Ou, writing the series composition for Higurashi, the Law of Ueki, and now successfully directs this Higurashi Rei OVA. I don’t know what made him see the light, but I really hope that he can keep this up for the future. At the same time, I’m getting more and more worried about Chiaki Kon. When Higurashi aired, I used to think that he was a great director, but his following series have gotten progressively worse: Junjo Romantica went nowhere in the end, Nodame Cantabile Paris, while good, raped the original series, and Hanasakeru was a complete and utter cheese and emo-fest. Is he really going to be the right guy to direct Umineko no Naku Koro ni?

Rating: *** (Awesome)
A quiet episode, but the sheer depth of it still amazes me.

To give a bit of an indication of how much I’m liking the current Spring Season: out of all of the shows I’m blogging right now (at the moment twelve of them), I like 07-Ghost the least. And yet the rest of this post is going to be nothing but praises for how much I liked this episode. This season may not have another Birdy the Mighty, but that’s also just about the only negative thing I can say about it. And really, if it can keep this up, it’s definitely going to turn into my favourite season since Spring 2007.

And Yes! It’s finally time for Mikage to show how he wasn’t exactly set free by Ayanami. The anime made it especially obvious that something was going to happen to him, and made it no surprise that he’d not live to see the second half of this show, and I must say still this episode in which we finally see his true colours doesn’t disappoint at all.

Because really, the past few episodes have really served their job in fleshing out Teito and Mikage, so that as an audience you’d really get to know the two of them. If the creators would simply have sent a brainwashed Mikage to Teito and immediately had him start trying to kill the guy, it would definitely have lacked impact. Now however, I loved seeing the relationship between the two being broken up by Ayanami. It was the moment everyone had been waiting for ever since Mikage popped up from absolutely nowhere, and yeah: it was great.

As a fantasy-series, 07 Ghost indeed doesn’t have the complex and imaginative setting that Shangri-La and Guin Saga can boast, nor the complex characters and well written dialogue of Pandora Hearts, but this series takes a much smaller setting and focus, and because its focus is so small (this series is just about Teito, who isn’t out there to save the world; you know the bad guys right from the start, the only setting of importance is the church), it really as the time to charm the viewer with this small story and bring out the best of it. And that’s the strength of 07-Ghost: it doesn’t feature much, but what it does, it does really well.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
I’m still amazed at how this episode was 20 minutes long, because it sucked me in completely. Finally the moment we’ve been waiting for has come.

This was a very strange and unusual episode. It was a nightmare for physicists, it featured some strange coincidences, but despite that I still like this series. If only because of the sheer GUTS it had during some of the scenes in this episode, which really showed that this show really isn’t going to pull its punches. This definitely is the most controversial series of the season.

To start with the lesser parts though, Kuniko’s escape is definitely going to raise some eye-brows, but then again, this series has always had its share of strange physics. There is carbon-trade, so why not make a hot balloon fueled on fermented orange juice that’s able to carry two people? That solar eclipse also had a bit too convenient of a timing. But then again, with all of the weird technology it’s of course also possible that the nanomaterial the girls found in the junkyard offered the solution. This is science-fiction, after all.

And yet I really love the rest of this series, and especially the characters. This series definitely has its issues now and then, but Kuniko is truly a remarkable lead who has the guts to go where most people wouldn’t even dare, and inspires others to do so as well, up to the point at which the fellow inmates start flirting with the prison guards in order to get all the preparations for the balloon right, and start offering their bodies.

And god… I was really shocked with how this episode ended. Kuniko has escaped, everyone is happy, people are starting to feel confident that Atlas can be beaten and that they have control… only for all of the inmates to be killed off by a simple order. WTF! It feels nowhere near a heroic sacrifice, and much more a death due to stupidity, and yet these girls did such a wonderful job of getting Kuniko out of prison.

The whole way in which everyone close to Kuniko reacted to the news of her execution: nobody getting scared, and everyone just thought that it was going to be another heroic escape from her with the necessary help from Momoko. It all shows how they’re trying to rebel to Atlas in even the smallest things. And then this episode comes and gives them a wake-up call even though they don’t even know what happened.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
I can really imagine that the cynics like Hanners are going to hate this episode, but for me it served its purpose: I was seriously shocked by what happened here.

Well, there you have it: another one of those advantages of having a series directed by Shinbo is that he can be really funny when he wants to. Especially with this series, which is just going to last for 13 episodes, has no chance whatsoever of milking itself out, you can be sure that the comedy is going to be really funny, and that’s exactly the case for this episode. I laughed really hard, and I loved how this episode used Jun’s character to draw out every last bit of comedic potential out of her.

Jun really has been a constant source of laughs, and because of this series’ good development it has yet to feel dull at all, and this episode was probably the funniest episode I watched this season. The idea of switching Jun and Hajime’s bodies was pure comedic gold. I especially loved how Hajime believed that he dropped his balls somewhere.

There’s nothing much else to say with such an episode of course, apart from how I’m pleased to see that the creators are also making good use of the running-joke about salt. This really is the kind of episode you need to watch for yourself.

Rating: *** (Awesome)
The funniest episode I have seen this spring season. With a length > 20 minutes in any case.

Oh my god. Seriously, is this series ever going to stop being so awesome? I mean, seriously. I deliberately tried to keep my expectations for this series low because I was 100% sure that Konnichiwa Anne wasn’t going to live up to Porfy and Les Miserables because of its unimpressive staff and low production-values, but Christ, this series has got to have the best 10 opening episodes of any WMT I have seen yet. Good lord! This is something I’ve never seen coming!

This episode was a real Bert-episode. It starts as Anne is talking to Katie Morris when the Winter has just fallen. Anne is happy that with the money that Bert is getting from his job, she can finally eat things that she’s never eaten, and the family seems a lot better now. She then gets called by Johanna in order to deliver Bert’s lunch, which he himself forgot.

At Bert’s meanwhile, the lady we saw a few episodes ago who was a good friend of Bertha: Grace Shermon. She’s actually very worried about how Anne is doing, though Bert, exhausted from his job and boss just gives her the cold shoulder when she tries to talk to her, so her husband imagines how Anne must be living in a horrible place, and Grace wonders why at the time, she never offered to take care of Anne.

Anne arrives when Bert’s boss is yelling at him for slacking off, and she talks a bit to the boss and drops off his lunch. That afternoon, Bert is in trouble because one of the packages (he’s working at a train station) is missing, and the boss blames Bert because he’s known to be a good for nothing guy. However, it seems to be a simple case of a mix-up. Bert is especially angry when the boss (Franklin) doesn’t even apologize for his actions. One of Bert’s co-workers then offers a bit of alcohol to cool off, though Bert manages to resist the urges.

When Bert gets home, it’s a total chaos, and all of the boys are yelling, crying and fighting with each other. When Bert gets home, he can’t take the noise and starts screaming. He tells that it’s Johanna’s job to take care of the children and cooking, and how he himself is tired from his job.

The next day, a couple from Bert’s childhood happens to run into him. As it turns out, they believe that he’s holding some high position due to the way he used to be. He also used to be the star of dance parties, and looked up to by the women. The woman then wonders how his children have been doing with dancing, but Bert says that they’re still small. He then offers Bert to join a dance party that they’re holding that evening, though then Bert’s boss shows up, and shows them that Bert didn’t really turn out to be the guy they expected.

That same evening Bert again walks out of the dinner room in order to get some fresh air. Anne then walks out to do the same in order to give the youngest baby a bit of fresh air. Bert wonders how she’s able to take all the noise, but then Anne says that doesn’t really get on her nerves, since Bert used to be much scarier when he still drank. The two of them then talk for a bit longer. It makes Bert think back of the dreams he used to have, and none of them really came true. He tells her how he and Johanna used to love dancing, and Anne really gets excited when she hears it, and this prompts a quick flashback to when Bert proposed (and oh god, the two of them looked so different from the way they look now!).

Bert then grabs the courage to tell Johanna about the dance party, though Johanna very quickly says that it’s ridiculous for people to be still interested in parties with this weather, so Bert drops it. In the end though, he does grab his carriage and heads off to the dance party on his own. The carriage unfortunately gets stuck, and he ends up missing the party. He listens from a distance how his two former friends talk about him, and he hears them making fun of him, and laughing at the mess that he has turned into.

And this really breaks him, and he stops by some of his older friends who are drinking some alcohol, and starts drinking away his miseries. His former boss then happens to walk by (probably returning from the dance as well), makes a few snide remarks, and that was the final straw for Bert and he starts beating him up. The result is of course that he gets fired.

Later that night, he returns singing loudly, waking up Anne. He seems to have been drinking even more, and spends the rest of the episode breaking just about everything inside the house up in his drunken rage.

I must say, that this series so far couldn’t have been better at all. There are SO MANY great shows this season. I honestly consider this to be the best season we’ve had in years so far. There are many series with unique executions, and even the slice of life genre has already got a very strong show with the wit of Cross Game… and yet Konnichiwa Anne turned into one of my absolute favourites for this season. I did not expect that.

Oh, how Bert turned into such a wonderful character. I really feel sorry for the guy, even though he loses himself so much, and all of his misery can be simply attributed to his actions. He’s really stuck in a downward spiral of his own feelings that is SO hard to get out of, because of his own alcohol addiction, but also because the people around him have lost faith in him because of the things he did.

And the downwards spiral has the entire family in its grip. Johanna herself really is a terrible mother: she does nothing but yell at her children, she fails to keep order and never seems to provide parental support for Horace and Edward, but that’s because she too is away most of the time, in order to make some extra money to get by. I was especially struck by how she refused to go to the dance: she’s too much caught up in her own lifestyle that something tells me that she’s forgotten how to have fun and enjoy herself. It’s a rather uncomfortable truth of poverty that you really don’t see often in anime.

On a bit of a lighter note, this episode really showed why Elisa was so important to Anne for the first couple of episodes. Without her, Anne would simply have grown up to be a quiet girl who lives inside her own world, but because she had someone to talk to and share her thoughts with, she really learned to express her feelings through words. It’s pretty similar to Kaze no Shoujo Emily, in which Emily had her own father for the first eleven years of her life.

If this show is already this awesome with only eight episodes, I really wonder what the creators have in store for the rest of the 39 episodes. So far, this series has been really heart-warming yet very, very sad. That on one side is so typical of the WMT, and yet it also has its own feel.

Rating: *** (Awesome)
A Bert-episode, and what a sad one it was!

You know, I didn’t really notice this among underlooked series as Shangri-la, Konnichiwa Anne and Natsu no Arashi, but Guin Saga also is starting to move under the radar this season. I mean, for as far as I know I’m the only one who’s still blogging it, and you hardly see anyone talk about it anymore. It’s a shame, because this series is pretty darn good.

This episode was an intermezzo between two big battles against the mongol army, and the biggest focus is Guin, as he tries to go after his past in a gamble that might give him the key to victory. We finally learn a bit about who the heck he was before his mind-wipe, although it’s still a bunch of vague hints. I especially liked that dream sequence of his. It was totally psychedelic, but it was nice to watch. At the end of the episode, we also encounter someone who looks surprisingly much like Guin himself, or at least in terms of clothing.

In the rest of the episode, the rest of the cast is fleshed out a bit. Remus gets finally a bit of confidence when he succeeds in making an arrow, while Amnelis is shown to be the stuck up princess that she is when she’s wasting precious water in the middle of a desert by washing her hair.

Though I do have some things that I’ve been wondering: why did the ape-men have an armour that perfectly fitted Guin? How did they get him a horse when they don’t use those animals themselves? It remains a bit strange. Also, I’m not really sure why Guin chose this moment to chase after his path. I didn’t exactly pick up what exactly he felt was so important about his past that made him so confident about winning.

Rating: * (Good)
A building-up episode, but it had a very good air of mystery.

Aha! And now we’ve really gotten to the good part! At the second half of this episode, the storyline finally completely diverges from that of the original series, and this is really the point I’ve been waiting for. And I must say, that something really strange has to happen in order to cause me to like the original series better. Even though at the same point, the original series had the advantage that it had already better fleshed out characters due to the bigger episode count, I still consider this episode to be better in every single way than its counterpart in the original series.

This episode really shows that this series was made for those who watched the original series. The point at which the story-lines diverge came at a point at which the fighting in the original series completely stopped, and instead Lust appears from out of nowhere and kills the armor that Ed had been fighting. And I must say that Envy also made a pretty large impression on me. In the original series, I never really knew what to think of him: he was there, he probably was the strongest of the Humonculi… and yet he never was involved in anything that important. For me, it just felt like he was a character for which the creators had no inspiration what to do with, yet had to include somewhere due to manga obligations.

This episode also saw the introduction of the Bomb Alchemist Kimblee, who in the original series felt rather annoying to me so I hope that this time he’s going to be better. In fact, the more I write about this series, the more I wonder why the heck I rated it so highly in the first place. The more I watch this series, the more flaws that seem to stand out (but then again, it did have a few parts it was great at).

But in any case, the thing I loved in this episode was the way it wasn’t afraid to quickly switch between tension and comedy to break up the mood. Especially Barry was hilarious, but even during the big climax, we quickly saw Ed’s arm failing and Envy joking around. These tactics are obviously very bad if a series doesn’t have a sense of humour, but in this case it really works well. There were many points later in this episode in which I had no idea whether to laugh or sympathize.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
We’ve finally arrived at the point where the series diverges from the original, and it’s starting off really well.

The more I watch of this show, the more I’m convinced: Cross Game is bloody brilliant. It’s really hard to put to words why, but I know of very few shows hat have such a dynamic sense of storytelling as this series has. Every single scene, even the most seemingly unimportant one, feels creative and fresh. Even though no major plot twist has happened at all since Wakaba’s death in episode one, there’s just such an awesome dynamic chemistry between the members of the cast. Not just the important characters, but even the simple side-characters feel like they have their own life. If it goes on like this, then it really feels like this series is going to raise the bar for high school dramas here.

This series is so full of these simple ideas that at the same time show how well the creators understand their characters. For example at the beginning of this episode, Akaishi sees Momiji for the first time, who is currently at the same age of Wakaba when she first died. And it really strikes how similar the two of them are now that the creators mention it. And it’s like Akaishi said: it’s still hard to believe that Wakaba was such a small girl when she died.

This episode also showed some epic spying skills by Kou and Akaishi. It’s so weird and stupid when you look at them, knowing that they’ve hidden themselves, and yet you really wouldn’t suspect it if you simply were training. The match in the upcoming should prove to be very interesting, because it’s going to feature to teams with a number of talented players (and one disaster of a pitcher) that don’t come together as a team. It’s probably going to come down to Kou’s pitching versus Azuma’s batting, but I’m really curious what the creators can make of it when they’ve already done such a fine job with the building up. I remember how you were hardly ever able to predict how a match in Touch would end, so who knows that Cross Game also has these sorts of nice surprises up its sleeve. ^^;

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Still carefully fleshing out its characters, but it’s subtlety and wit still continue to shine.

Phantom already was one of my favourites this series… and with this episode it became even better. Seriously, what an amazing episode. This is EXACTLY why I’m such a big Bee-Train fan.

This really is the episode where the plot takes a complete shirt, and how well it works! We first start out with McCunnen showing Zwei the passport of his pre-mindwipe self, allowing him to remember some vague parts about who he was. He even goes as far as making a phone call to his former family! The reason why she’s doing this is also revealed: Mad Professor betrays Inferno! He has enough confidence in Ein in order to defy such a powerful organization.

Since Ein was a bit of a puppet to the guy, McCunnen tried to make Zwei make his own decisions, in the hope that he’d return to her on his own will. And yet she didn’t take into account how close Ein and Zwei have grown for the past number of episodes, and so Zwei instead decides to run away. So much potential for character-development!

But oh god, the scene that really hit me was the one in which Zwei (or Reiji, as his real name turns out to be) stood next to a badly shot Ein and was forced to take out the bullet that launched itself inside her hip, with only primitive tools and no anaesthetic whatsoever. That really was fantastically executed and SO full of emotions.

Really, this series just continues to amaze me. You’d think that this would be a simple assassin series in which the characters kill a bunch of people as ordered by their organization, and then WHAM: it comes with this episode. With this, it has really set itself apart from Noir, which was much more episodic, and had completely different themes from what Phantom has developed into.

Rating: **** (Fantastic)
Utterly amazing, this episode completely exceeded my expectations.

A bit of a strange episode, which takes us outside of Rollingtown as Dan and the others are looking for an opponent that isn’t scared of Iceman’s ‘destroy’-attacks. The plot takes a step back in this episode in order to focus a bit on the development of the characters and introduce the final bunch of main characters: those three idols we’ve been seeing in the OP. At this point it’s still unknown what kind of purpose they actually have in this series, but that should get a bit clearer after the next episode.

But yeah, if anyone here has a bipolar disorder, it has to be Iceman. This episode explores his past, and as it turns out: he kept getting kicked out of his former teams because he kept abusing his team mates with what was just his version of a passionate pass. Just like with Dan and coco, because he never said anything about it everyone kept thinking he was trying to destroy everyone (and really, who wouldn’t?) It definitely is a very strange sort of background. Still, I’m definitely curious about Sera’s back-story right now. Judging from the OP, it looks a lot more serious.

And that little princess of ours… she keeps moving further and further away from the regular image you’d have of an important princess like her. She’s athletic, doesn’t whine when she’s all alone in the middle of the desert, and she probably is the least spoiled princess I’ve seen in an anime. Though I do wonder what that strange voice was that she heard. This doesn’t really seem like a mystery-series, and yet the creators went that way with a mysterious voice that only one character can hear.

Rating: * (Good)
Not the best of the show, but the development on Iceman was appreciated.